Brittany Bends Read Online Free PDF Page B

his hand pats my shoulder in this kinda there-there way.
    “I’m sorry,” I say into his jacket. “I’m sorry. I’m being a baby. I’m sorry.”
    “No,” he says. “God, if I were in your shoes, I’d be scared too.”
    He sounds uncertain, not like the Eric I know at all. Usually Eric sounds confident no matter what he’s talking about (whether he knows it in detail or not).
    Tears squeeze out of my eyes, no matter how hard I try to stop crying. I haven’t cried much since I got to the Johnson Family Manse. Not after the first week, when Ingrid (who is only eight) plopped down on my bed and said, “So what’s it like to be a drama queen?”
    I sniffle, and wish I had a tissue. I sit up and start to wipe my face with my bare hand, but Eric hands me three crumpled Subway napkins.
    “Have you told Mom?” he asks. He calls Mom “mom” even though she’s not his biological mom. She raised him from the age of three.
    I shake my head, and then I frown. “Told Mom what?”
    “About how scared you are?”
    I shake my head again, more firmly this time, because I really mean it now, and say, “She’s being just great. She has a lot to deal with and I don’t need to add to it.”
    “She loves you, you know,” he says.
    Tears start again. So what’s it like to be a drama queen? Awful. Just awful. Megan (my therapist) says I learned to cry so my sisters didn’t have to, and now it’s just a habit.
    I hate that habit. I hate hate hate it.
    I’m shaking my head at the tears, trying to convince them to go away.
    “She does,” Eric says.
    He must think I’m disagreeing about Mom loving me. I never doubted that. She just doesn’t understand me.
    “When she had to go to Greece every summer,” he says, “she was so nervous. She always wanted you here at home, but she told us that you were better off there, and when we asked to meet you, she said the whole family thing was too hard, and then she’d be excited and thrilled to go, and when she got home…”
    His voice trailed off. He shrugged one shoulder, then leaned toward the driver’s door and fished more napkins out of the pocket that Karl told him to use for maps.
    I swallow hard. “When she got home,” I prompt.
    “She’d go to her room for a day or two and cry,” he says to the floor.
    That stops me cold. Mom cries ? I’ve never seen it. She’s always so strong. And she cried over me? Really?
    “You’re making that up,” I say before I can stop myself.
    He shakes his head. “I’m not.”
    Then he sits up and glares at me. “If you tell her I said anything, I’ll call you a dirty stupid liar.”
    He sounds nervous and childish. Eric never sounds childish either. His whole tone actually makes me want to smile, but I don’t because that might make him mad.
    “I won’t say anything,” I promise.
    He hands me more napkins. “Good,” he says.
    “How do you know she loves me?” I ask, because I can’t just leave it there. I mean, I’m a drama queen. (Megan told me to own that, and then change it. I’m still getting used to the owning part.) For all I know, being a drama queen is something you inherit like blue eyes and hair so blonde it’s almost white. So, Mom might be a drama queen, only with years more experience in controlling her drama queenness.
    Eric closes his eyes for a minute, and I recognize the expression. He doesn’t want to say anything, but I’ve backed him into a corner, and what can he say? He’s going to answer me because he’s just that kind of guy.
    “Before you moved here, she talked about you all the time, and she’d say she wished we could meet you.” He shrugs again. “She hated that you weren’t allowed to come here. You weren’t, right?”
    I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. So I’m not going to contradict her without asking her, and I’m not going to tell Eric that I don’t know.
    I nod, and wipe at my left cheek. It’s really wet.
    “She’d tell stories about you,” he says, “and